The proliferation of netbooks and associated technologies
With Web2.0, person to web based application interaction has become richer and easier. In addition, due to concepts of Green Computing, organizations are trying to go for systems like Cloud Computing, virtualization and more centralized processing thus bringing the total number of processing entities to a minimum which would result in a smaller carbon footprint and significant cost savings. Therefore, the current trend is headed towards us going back to the area where processing happens in a ‘cloud’ of which we do not know much other that how to get the service. Loosely speaking, we are going back to the days of the good old main frames and dumb terminals with of course many differences in terms of performance, user experience, richness and complexity of operations and services.
Due to all of the above reasons, notebook manufacturers started coming up with low power, low cost devices which were coined as ‘netbooks’ by shrinking localized performance and improving connectivity, robustness and user interfaces. Ideally these devices had screen sizes of 5”-9” inches, 1GB RAM, Few GBs of Solid State Disk space and an Intel Atom processor. Furthermore, it is easy to use slight variants of the Oss we currently have, since these too are based more on the x86 architecture.
The Asus Eee PC was the first commercial success for Netbooks and the different netbook brands and models of that followed have become more compact and better in performance. Personally speaking, based on the configurations and features currently available in netbooks like the Eee PC, I would feel happier to start using one of those for my day-to-day computing needs.
The Wikipedia article about netbooks has a pretty comprehensive explanation worth checking out by any enthusiast.
UNR at a glance
Ubuntu has been talking for ‘remix’ versions of their products for a while, and now we have such a ‘remix’ up for grabs. Remixes are specials editions that have been created targeted at a specific purpose. Therefore, Ubuntu Netbook Remix(UNR) is an optimized variant of Ubuntu which is targeted to run on low power low cost devices like netbooks and other low power laptops.
Below is a couple of screens from the UNR I tried out.
Features of UNR
Being pretty aggressive when it comes to modernization, Ubuntu took steps to come up with a respun verison of Ubuntu geared towards these kind of devices. This is pretty similar to the approach taken by Xandros Linux which is a customized Linux OS that was shipped with the Eee PC. The Easy-Peasy OS is also similar to this.
Underneath UNR can have Ubuntu 8.04 or higher, but the UI is optimized to run on smaller screens. I took hold of the 9.10 version of it, which was released about 2 weeks ago, and tried out on a virtual PC on my Virtual Box instance, and it was pretty striking in the first go.
When the UNR initiative kicked off, it was few packages that made this all happen. You can simply get hold of the special packages that give life to UNR and install them on top of your existing Ubuntu instance. So, basically it was more of a UI related optimization that had been done in contrast to a whole new optimization done in the kernel level to achieve performance and efficient resource utilization on low end devices.
Windows7 boasts of its heavily efficient resource usage and ability to track energy hogging applications and although Fedora has managed to keep the energy meter at a lower level, Ubuntu has had some issue when it comes to retaining battery power. PowerTop can be used to track the energy utilization of your Linux system. However, guys at Canonical are working hard on that collaborating with the Mobilin project which aims at forming a resource efficient OS and application stack for mobile internet devices. This is essential since resource efficiency would be a key factor when Ubuntu or UNR is to be a mainstream OS on low power devices (Canonical is taking steps to ship UNR preinstalled on most netbooks). Xandros Linux which comes with Eee PC claims to be pretty efficient on power consumption, but I did not find any statistical evidence for that (I didn’t search much J ). Anyway it is cruel to ask for too much from UNR since it is a ‘remix’ and not a ‘netbook edition’ as such.
However, when it comes to UNR 9.10, the there seems to have been a significant leap. The packages that used to power previous UNR version are deprecated, and it has been built from ground up to take the best of the speed and power features of the chipset.
Minimum Hardware Requirements:
• Processor: Intel® Atom™ processor
• RAM: 512 MB
• Storage: 4 GB Flash disk (SSD) or hard disk
Let me summarize some features of UNR I came across. Some features are present in the Ubuntu 9.10 standard edition too.
• A vertical left nav menu based user interface: This is an optimal way of producing output in small screens. The ordinary desktop is replaced with a set of tabs on the left and the context content appearing in the remaining space. The applications are categorized in to these tabs based on the utility.
• ‘Ubuntu One’ access : This is an awesome option which gives the user access to his personal cloud with 2GB capacity for free (capacity can be increased if you are willing to pay for it). With this, backing up, synchronizing and sharing data becomes ever so easy.
• Empathy IM : Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy IM which additionally has better audio/video support as well as built in SIP support.
• OpenOffice 3.1 : The good old open office that all of us know of.
• Rhythmbox : A simple yet fully fledged player inspired by Apple iTnes which has comprehensive support for a gamoot of audio formats, sync capabilities with devices, rip and burn capabilities and support for Internet Radio and podcasts.
• And many more…
Looking forward to get hold of a netbook and join the hype ASAP!!!
